The TRON Foundation recently announced that it had locked up over 33.25 billion tokens in 1,000 addresses on its mainnet, which was launched on June 25. The team provided some details about these addresses on Facebook and hinted toward the development of a query tool to let Tronics members can check these addresses. The tokens will be locked till January 1, 2020.
Reducing Token Availability
TRON initially had 100 billion tokens in total, out of which 1 billion were burnt after the mainnet launch. According to the TRON blog on Medium, founder Justin Sun “was distressed to witness the burn of $50 million worth of tokens, TRON Foundation had no turning back for the better development of TRON community.”
Out of the remaining 99 billion, 65.75 million are currently in circulation, while the 33.25 billion are locked away.
The company announced details of these addresses in a Facebook post and added:
“In order to let Tronics search these addresses more conveniently, we are also making the query tool for these addresses. Thanks for your support to TRON, TRON and TIG will keep the TRX safe and build a free, decentralized community.”
Why Lock Coins in 1,000 Addresses?
The TRON Foundation has ensured the security of its tokens by distributing billions of coins to 1,000 addresses. If one (or a few) of these addresses is compromised, the company will still be able to save the majority of its assets.
TRON could be following the footsteps of Ripple, which put XRP coins worth $55 billion in a secure escrow account on December 7, 2017, to ensure token supply predictability. For TRON, the move could help in gaining market confidence. The market cap of TRX is currently $2.5 billion, making it the 11th largest cryptocurrency in the world, according to CoinMarketCap.
